Biodata

Stephen Reilly Jr is working as an EAP tutor for the University of Leicester in NE China and as a mentor for students in Gaza. He has over 25 years’ classroom experience, notably at the British Council in France and Egypt. Email: stephen.reilly.jr@proton.me

 

Background to the online 2024 course to Gazans

The teacher, Stephen Reilly Jr, was based in Cairo at the time of teaching, whilst the students were, in their majority, in Gaza, either in the north, the south or Gaza city with all the limitations, imposed restrictions, and danger that this entailed. 

In this article, Stephen Reilly Jr describes his experience during winter 2024 of teaching an IELTS preparatory course online to a group of young Gazan graduates and his awakening to the Palestinian embodiment of Sumud. He evokes his discoveries and sources of support for teaching the class and concludes that the lessons the students taught him were more abundant and significant than any he delivered to them.

The virtual course, delivered by the author and his teaching colleagues, had been set up by Ms. Hiba Ibrahim, a then doctoral candidate in applied linguistics, in partnership with Business and Technology Incubator (BTI) and the Islamic University of Gaza to prepare students for the University of Cambridge IELTS exam. Scoring in the exam’s higher bands allows the Gazan students to bolster their academic portfolios, increase their chances of obtaining scholarships abroad and escape the ongoing Israeli-perpetrated genocide.

This article describes the course, and lists lessons that the students inadvertently taught the author-teacher along with suggestions to other educators readying to engage in similar classes. It also allows the author to come to terms with a traumatic teaching experience–the circumstances of the classes, the students’ descriptions of their predicaments, and the background noises of military hardware were, as the reader might imagine, as upsetting as they sound.

‘Thank you soooo much’

‘Thank you sooo much for everything you’ve done for us, Mister Stephen’ said Yasmine at the end of the online IELTS preparation course for Gazan students at the beginning of this year. She was echoed volubly by her classmates as I lay back in my padded chair in Cairo staring at the floor, squirming, and clawing my face. Never in the history of my English language teaching career were so many thanks sent by so many students to so undeserving a teacher.

Not content with thanking the undeserving, the Gazan students had collectively and generously improvised a series of lessons on life, humility, trust, hope and, on one of many Arabic words they taught me, Sumud, a word with no exact English equivalent, however is commonly defined as a blend of ‘steadfastness’ and ‘perseverance’ (Alhelou, Y., 2019 and Awayed-Bishara, Muzna, 2023). This was, all in all, a singular experience from which I received much more than I gave. 

‘Who do you support?’

I’d been living in Cairo for some years and in the aftermath of October the 7th I sat powerlessly watching Israeli war crimes and a genocide unfolding. Getting depressed was one option; making gestures, as miniscule as they were, in favour of this martyred people was another. So, I donated to Egyptian charities helping Palestinian refugees, gave blood for Gazans at the local hospital and bought Palestinian products. With a friend we ate regularly in the Palestinian restaurants of Nasr City where they gathered and listened to accounts of those who’d escaped. 

The smallness and seeming insignificance of these gestures was only one element feeding my frustration. Another was the nearness and yet apart-ness that we in Egypt have to Gazans. Egyptian citizens are sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians and would on occasion stop me, the foreigner, to ask who I ‘supported’. The two peoples are cousins: close geographically, culturally, and religiously. Moreover, they eat similar food and their Arabics are mutually intelligible. Indeed, a mere 200-mile bus trip to the Egyptian-Gazan border would have united us. But the Egyptian army doesn’t permit us to enter even North Sinai towards the Gazan-Israeli border, as is now widely known (Reuters staff, 2025), and the Gazan people live like high-security prisoners with no prospect other than an impending death in a now wrecked prison. There’s no people that I’m less likely to meet in my lifetime but I had to do something.

 

An appeal on LinkedIn

So, when I saw an appeal on LinkedIn for IELTS trainers to train Gaza students, I could only apply and hope. The courses were set up and run between November 2024 and January 2025 by Hiba Ibrahim, a PhD candidate at York University, Canada. She’d assembled a dozen-strong group of volunteer teachers world-wide willing to teach an IELTS preparation course to Gazans enrolled in different universities. The course aim was to enable students to score highly in an IELTS test, so that they may meet foreign universities’ academic requirements for scholarships and study abroad–assuming that universities would admit them, governments would grant them entry visas and the Israeli government would permit them to travel. 

Thus, I embarked on a programme of teaching one-hour online IELTS reading classes two mornings a week from my flat in Giza to some 12 students as well as correcting practice speaking test audio recordings on WhatsApp and written homework via Google drive. Other pieces of creative writing were also submitted and corrected on a voluntary basis. 

Hiba, the lead teacher, had entrusted me with the role based on my previous experience of IELTS examining and training, but in reality, I’d always been an inept examiner. Useless at mastering simultaneously the recital of a script along with timing, noting and evaluating discourse, I would let candidates speak longer than they were allowed to, reassure them if they were too stressed and then engage them in discussion during the wrong speaking part. After a long year I realised that teaching was my thing, not examining but also that the experience of the latter would feed the former and make me a better IELTS trainer. So, upon seeing Hiba’s appeal, I applied for the voluntary work with a renewed feeling of usefulness. 

‘Kind foreign teachers looking out for us’

Classes were taught on Zoom and material taken from Pearson's Expert IELTS preparation along with virtual practice tests. All the course material was placed on Piazza, the online Q & A platform for teachers and students, so that the latter may access them and WhatsApp served as a medium for student-teacher communication.

The students had jumped at the opportunity of these free lessons, which one student described as ‘kind foreign teachers looking out for us’, and participated fully once in class. Word had spread among the students; many were unable to book a place and waiting lists were long: already a display of Sumud in the pursuit of any learning opportunities available to them. 

Sumud in attendance

The Gazans overcame every imaginable obstacle in their quest to learn with us. A core of students attended class regularly, others intermittently. Over the duration of the course, the Israeli army killed at least two of the students as well as killing and maiming others’ family members. Many more students had their homes bombed or set alight after they were occupied by Israeli soldiers and the majority joined classes from tents.

Prior to class, students were charging old smart phones on converted generators powered by solar panels that they’d gotten permission to use from generous neighbours. And as the bombings endured and intensified, these panels were becoming a scarce resource. As one student, Khulud, explained, ‘We hide them because when the Israelis see them charging on our rooftops, they bomb the building’.

‘We’re all experts in engine roars’

Then students had to free themselves from more urgent domestic duties such as looking for food, buy extortionately priced pay-as-you-go cards from street corner sellers to access the remains of PalTel, the Palestinian 2G telecoms network (Fatafta, M., et al, 2023) on which we were undoubtedly monitored (Arab News staff, 2024 and Biddle, S., 2024). After which they would seek out a hot spot: close enough to a telecom tower to capture a network; far enough from the persistent deafening drones and fighter jets that were common background, and often foreground, noise during lessons.

‘They photograph our faces and sometimes shoot us’

‘We’re all experts now in engine roars’ explained Khulud again. ‘We know the differences between the different models of drones and fighter jets’. Owing to the frequent background din from her connection, I often had to mute her so that the lesson could continue. ‘That was a reconnaissance drone' she informed us after one prolonged muting. ‘We try to keep our backs to them because they photograph our faces and sometimes shoot us’.

Only one student from my classes, Esme, had managed to flee across the Gazan-Egyptian border at Rafa and down into Cairo where she found herself one among over 100,000 Palestinian refugees in Egypt (Marks, J. 2024). She and her family had paid, similar to her compatriots, tens of thousands of US dollars to escape across the Gazan-Egyptian border. However, as she remained registered as a student with the near-destroyed and now virtual Islamic University of Gaza, she seized the opportunity given to her to improve her IELTS score in the hope of joining a prestigious university. Sumud in learning come what may.

 

Palestinians: ‘the world’s best-educated refugees’

Most of the students had studied English language and literature up to university level and based on the language levels of graduates whom I’d taught in other countries and pictures of the Gazans’ dilapidated education system, I’d expected an intermediate level (CEFR: B1) in their spoken and written language at best. Yet, many were upper intermediate (B2) with a handful bordering on advanced (C1)–a scarcely believable achievement given that their short lives had been spent within the narrow confines of Gaza and that none had ever been allowed so much as a short visit to Israel, much less a trip to an English-speaking country. 

‘I find a quiet corner and study from my phone’

Then there’s school. Each day, they endure long school commutes, braving harassment at military checkpoints where they risk being arrested indefinitely, before attending lessons with 50 other students back-to-back with another class in bullet-ridden and bombed classrooms whilst students make do with notebooks and pens and teachers with nibs of chalk and collapsed blackboards. Worse, since October 7th, most students told me they’d been living among rubble, or in tents, or their bombed homes, damaged and liable to collapse at any time. Others told me they’ve been renting space from the neighbours, with family members sheltering all in the same room. ‘It’s almost impossible’ said Amr describing his efforts to pursue learning at home, ‘but I find a quiet corner and study from my phone with my headphones on.’ 

Of course, had I done prior research, I might have predicted how well the students spoke English and how literate they would be. Literacy levels in Palestine are among the highest in the world–yes, you’ve read that correctly (MEE staff, 2018)–and Gazans detain the highest among the Palestinians with over 97% of children over fifteen able to read and write (Alghoul, D., 2018). Moreover, in the NGO circles, Gazans hold the bitter-sweet title of ‘the world’s best-educated refugees’ (Irfan, A. 2023). 

‘18% of adults in England are functionally illiterate’

In comparison, some 18% of adults in England, according to the National Literacy Trust in the UK, have ‘very poor literacy skills’ or are ‘functionally illiterate’ (National Literacy Trust, 2024). With a near perfect rate of literacy, the Gazans would have much to teach us UK citizens about how to improve ours. 

 

Love of English language and all things British

Not content with speaking an advanced level of English, many of the graduate students from English Language and Literature impressed by quoting from, among others, Milton's Paradise Lost, reciting Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience and discussing themes from Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Those who hadn’t studied English literature were still knowledgeable of British TV series, popular music and literature and quizzed me about anything from TV series Downton Abbey to Agatha Christie novels. 

‘We Brits simply don’t deserve you’

For me, as a UK citizen and native English-speaker, this was humbling, not to say embarrassing. I please myself in thinking, as M. H. Ahmed writes (Ahmed, Dr. M. H., 2025), that ‘in Palestine, ELT is both a battleground and a beacon of hope’ and that ‘classrooms become sites of empowerment where students reclaim their voices and narratives’. Yet, whilst student Sara was asking me about the songs of music group The Cure, and Noura enquiring about realism in TV series Skins, I couldn’t forget that this country that they’re so enamoured of continues to sell arms to Israel (Brooke-Holland, L., 2024), that its Foreign Minister holds secret meetings with his Israeli counterpart (Mulla, I., 2025) and that its Prime Minister suggests that Israel is entitled to withhold water (McShane, A., 2023), whilst paying mere lip service to the importance of Israel’s upholding international law (Stacey, K., 2025). 

Unfathomable was their steadfastness in learning our language, their love of all things British, yet our arms shoot, bomb, maim and slaughter them. ‘We Brits simply don’t deserve you’, I thought on more than one occasion.

 

Triggers

Needless to say, the lessons themselves were often fraught with tension–each and every one of the students lived in constant fear of their lives and those of their loved ones. They’d all lost family members and friends and had seen others maimed or mutilated and this worsened with each passing week. Many had had their blocks of flats bombed, and, in at least one case, burned, as was the practice of the Israeli soldiers when they’d used a Palestinian building as a military base. Most students were joining us from tents as they had fled military attacks and bombings and were forbidden to return home.

‘I remembered my own favourite garden’

We teachers are taught the importance of ‘creating a safe and predictable classroom environment’ (Abdel Latef, N. 2025) in order to support students who’ve experienced trauma, which is undoubtedly true for those who’ve, say, fled a war-torn country and now find themselves in a place of safety. However, it’s a nigh impossible environment to create when teaching to students who are still living in a zone of conflict and even being targeted during class. Their daily circumstances were never predictable, nor were students’ reactions to their surroundings. 

‘The Israelis have come to wish us a happy new year’

Unpredictable too was the Palestinians’ sense of humour in coping with the pervasive threat of death. At the beginning of January, Khulud interrupted one of our reading lessons: ‘Oh, the Israelis have come to wish us a happy new year’ she chuckled before disappearing offline. ‘Let me see if I can record their wishes’. Minutes later she re-appeared posting on our WhatsApp group a recording of Israeli machine gun fire.  

Reactions to different topics from the class material were no more foreseeable either. During one mock IELTS speaking part 2 test we practised, student Leila had to speak of a garden or park she remembered visiting as a child, whilst her classmates marked her performance according to the four IELTS speaking criteria—a standard practice activity in any IELTS speaking preparation class. I’d predicted that Leila would struggle to speak for more than a minute, but she managed a structured monologue for almost two. On asking her classmates for feedback on her speaking performance, however, they had none. ‘I couldn’t concentrate’, said Mona. ‘Once Leila began to speak, I remembered my own favourite garden, became nostalgic, and in my sadness could think of nothing else’. Other students chimed in: ‘We remembered what we’d lost and couldn’t focus.’

‘Let’s talk about your home town or village’

Indeed, none of the other dozen or so students could provide any feedback, and it transpired that I’d made a major oversight: a failure to predict that triggering topics are triggering for everyone, listeners and speakers alike. Still, I had to strike a balance between avoiding any overtly triggering IELTS topics, such as ‘Let’s talk about your hometown or village’, whilst preparing them for the reality of potentially upsetting topics during the actual exam. 

So, my challenge then became ‘How can we teachers achieve lesson aims and enable students to enrich their language all the while tiptoeing through these topic minefields?’ One obvious answer was to hold a lengthy ‘check-in’ period at the beginning of every lesson. Students shared personal news and talked about their past week. They exchanged news about families, and importantly, the zones in which they were currently living. This allowed everyone to know where they were all at before commencing the lesson material.

Another answer was to allow students to choose the lesson material. Pre-lesson, I’d scan the online book for potentially triggering topics. Then I’d ask students to choose them together, shifting onto them and away from me the responsibility of selecting the content, and ensuring greater student engagement. It was also, mea culpa, a cop-out: a means to avoid that responsibility and any eventual accusations of being insensitive. 

‘Now I wish I’d asked’

That said, sometimes I would on occasion veto material prior to their selection. One IELTS reading topic was about psychologist Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of our Nature (Pinker, S., 2011), essentially a treatise about how violence has decreased throughout history and how life is getting better everywhere for everyone across the world despite our beliefs to the contrary. ‘As one becomes aware of the historical decline of violence, the world begins to look different. The past seems less innocent, the present less sinister’ is one of the more frequently cited statements from the work. ‘This is not a topic’, I told myself, ‘that I wish besieged Gazans to discuss’, and so discarded it. But then, maybe, given the choice, they would have been willing to and I was wrong. After all, they had shown willingness to cover any other topic as long as it allowed them to improve their English language skills. Now I wish I’d asked.

 

Lessons from other teachers and students in war zones

Recognising my inexperience in teaching students in a war zone and seeking help from other knowledgeable practitioners was essential. So, a month prior to the course, I attended an online conference, Emergent Education in War Zones, organised and chaired by Nick Bilbrough of the charity The Hands Up Project (Bilbrough, N., 2022), in which teachers shared their on-the-ground experiences of teaching in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine. As these educators had also learned mostly from their students, this is a conference that I would return to throughout my own online course in a quest for wisdom and guidance.

Professor Scott Thornbury opened the conference by sketching some theoretical and historical background of emerging curricula. He made the distinction between closed (planned and structured) and open types (unplanned and unstructured) insisting on the importance of the latter, particularly in the context in which presenters and participants were teaching. He stressed on the importance of a negotiated curriculum, one that is defined according to the emerging needs and changing environment of the students and teachers alike. Then for further reading he referred us to Ronald V. White for his distinction of the type A ‘interventionist’ syllabus and type B, which Thornbury, in reference to Paulo Freire’s writings, termed ‘dialogic’. Finally, he took us on a tour of illustrious educators such as Sylvia Ashton Warner, Charles A. Curran and John Wade to show us how their on-the-ground radical teaching experiences might underpin and inspire our own in war zones.

‘Teachers should always spread love and hope to children whatever the circumstances’

Teacher Ashraf Kuheil from Gaza recounted how he had founded a children’s school in the front room of his own home after all the surrounding schools had been bombed. On the first day, he’d expected five students at best, but young learners flocked to his house, and he’d ended up with 25. Their age range widened, and the school grew in size. And when one of the teachers, Omar, was shot dead by an Israeli soldier, Ashraf, in the depths of his grief, still turned up and taught class the following day. On being asked by conference attendees on how he’d coped, Ashraf replied that teacher Omar would have wanted him to show up, that if we teachers don’t ‘carry hope’ for children, then, he asked us, ‘who else can we count on?’ He concluded by declaring unequivocally ‘we as teachers should always spread love and hope to children whatever the circumstances’.

If hope was a recurring theme in Ashraf Kuheil’s presentation, in Katherine Martinkevich’s, it was cope. Based in Ukraine, Katherine, informed us that teachers and students alike, although living through the same war, all had different experiences of it. She evoked the importance of routine and structure for teachers and students alike during class time as an antidote to the chaos and anarchy in their everyday lives. She went on to cite examples of teachers who feed emergent language into their lessons as events unfolded in real time (air raid shelter, explosion, missile), whilst others, in a quest for stability, ‘carry on teaching as if nothing has happened’. 

‘Teachers should do what they do best: teach’

Also of note, Katherine shared, was that students’ attention spans had gotten shorter and classroom performances could swing unpredictably depending on the happenings of that particular day (Reynolds, S., & Costa, B., 2023). Students coped better with more ‘grounded’ lessons, which meant deploying attention-drawing techniques such as visuals, text and realia and getting them to use pen and paper for notes. Lastly, ‘teachers should do what has helped us survive until now and what they do best: teach’. These were revelatory words for me sitting powerless at home. 

If, in Ukraine teachers and students found solace in textbooks and their remoteness from the war, in Sudan they were discarded: too unrealistic and irrelevant to the students’ and teachers’ now war-torn lives. Instead, renowned Sudanese educator Mohamed Siefan and his team created syllabi based on the creative arts, notably singing and storytelling and they sourced many of the language learning activities from Nick Bilbrough’s Stories Alive, a resource book of story telling and activities for YLs (Bilbrough, N., 2016). Their traditional classes ‘about learning English’ became classes ‘using English’ where they sang and talked about the future and what their different futures would be like: immediate, near and far off. 

‘Two warring generals could have stopped the war on day one just by attending English classes’

Mohamed evoked the revelation that the students, contrary to expectations, had become more active in choosing content for the lessons and that they were the ones teaching the teachers how to cope with the war. The classes, the YL students’ parents told him, brought them all peace of mind, and this encouraged him to carry on. ‘Well, if they bring peace of mind’ he mused, ‘the two warring generals could have stopped this war on day one just by attending English classes.’ 

Thus, through Katherine’s counsel of groundedness, Mohamed’s creation of student-centred arts syllabi and Ashraf’s plea to teachers to continue to spread hope through our teaching whatever the circumstances, we could lay the foundations for my own course with the Gazans.

‘La esperenza muera ultima’

Indeed, Ashraf’s words about the vitalness of hope were, I realised later, one of the founding premises of all teaching, not to say of all life (Webb, D., 2018). From the poetic ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’ and ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’ to the saintly ‘Where there is despair, may we bring hope’, the abundance of verse on this component of human desire and belief exists for good reason (Bloeser, C., & Stahl, T., 2017). In Studs Terkel’s book of oral histories, Hope Dies Last, (Terkel, S., 2004), he quotes farm worker Jessie de la Cruz: ‘With us there’s a saying, "La esperenza muera ultima. Hope dies last." You can't lose hope. If you lose hope, you lose everything.’ 

‘See you next week? Insha’Allah’

And so this imperative to ‘carry hope’ must therefore be manifest in my own teaching ‘whatever the circumstances’ as Ashraf said. After a lesson during which I listened to Khulud’s account of her sister’s worn-through, flooded tent, about how shrapnel martyred her grandfather, and how her collapsing building maimed her brother-in-law, I wondered how to conclude class and bid them farewell till next time. What about ‘See you next week?’ I said it, and I got a resounding chorus of ‘Insha’Allah’ in return. ‘Oh yes, you’re right’, I managed to retort with burning red cheeks. ‘God willing. Of course,’. After all, they might not be here ‘next week’. So, say what instead? ‘Stay safe’? I’d have choked. In later lessons I made a heartfelt plea of something like ‘I hope from the depths of my heart to see you all next week safe and sound’. After all, Israeli soldiers did shoot dead and bomb participants from our classes whilst other students disappeared without a trace, and we could only fear the worst.

‘The basic function of all education (...) is to increase the chances of the survival prospects of the group’

Postman and Weingartner in their infamous book Teaching as a Subversive Activity (Postman, N., & Weingartner, C., 1969) write ‘The basic function of all education, even in the most traditional sense, is to increase the chances of the survival prospects of the group. If this function is fulfilled, the group survives. If not, it doesn’t.’ Despite the Israelis’ destruction of schools, universities and students, the Gazans strive to fulfill this function. And the above authors’ words were complemented in those of one of my mentees, Menna, when she explained to me what this function means to them and in what might just lie an explanation for Palestinian Sumud in education and their outstanding rates of literacy: ‘Education here is not just a human right; it's an act of resistance to prove we're still alive and believe in a better future.’ 

Long live Palestine and the Palestinians.

 

Postface

Readers might be interested to know that student Khulud made it out of Gaza to Geneva where she obtained a scholarship at the University and is studying an MA in Translation and Linguistics. When we finally met earlier this year in the Swiss city, she offered a deeper definition of the elusive Arabic word: ‘Sumud is more than just resilience or steadfastness. It's not just endurance. To me, it’s living with purpose despite everything. It’s refusing to let the world write your story for you. It’s a way of adopting life no matter the pain, and choosing to fight for meaning and dignity under impossible circumstances.’

 

Thank-yous

Stephen Reilly Jr wishes to thank his parents for endless encouragement, support and re-readings of this chapter. Also to Roy Stafford for being given space and time at his flat in Courbevoie to begin writing it. And to all of my Gazan students whose lessons in Sumud and everything else have given me the wherewithal to write this chapter. 

Special thanks to student-teacher-author Khulud, whose contribution to classes along with her insightfulness, eloquence and humour, inspired much of this.

 

References

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